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CB Editorial

I guess you could call it travel guilt. It kicked in big time last year, when a number of friends were planning trips to Yosemite National Park. At some point, someone asked me what my kids liked to do in Yosemite.

I started to talk about the Mist Trail then realized, though I love Yosemite, I’ve never taken my kids. We live in Northern California. Yosemite is practically our backyard. I got out the calendar and picked a weekend. It was still winter, I had months before I needed to get organized … or so I thought.

I had the pleasure of meeting Sunset Magazine’s Deputy Travel Editor, Peter Fish, last weekend at annual Celebration Weekend at their headquarters in Menlo Park. Sunset is longtime resource for Best of Western Living content — from travel tips, to home decorating ideas, to gardening — this magazine always has unique ideas to share. I picked Peter’s…

I have a confession to make: I have been engaged in a love affair for over a decade. It was truly love at first sight, and now I can’t ever seem to get enough. The object of my affection? Our country’s National Park system. I have yet to find a park that I didn’t absolutely adore.

As a matter of fact, I have made it a personal goal to visit every single National Park (yep, all 58 of them) with my children. Last summer, I took my kids to the original National Park, Yellowstone.

It’s safe – Kilauea Volcano is sometimes referred to as the “drive-in volcano” – and it’s interesting. Enter the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, located near Volcano Village, and take the 11-mile Crater Rim Drive, which circles Kilauea’s summit caldera and craters. You can see the eruption at Halema‘uma‘u Crater, learn about lava at the Jaggar Museum, peer into steam vents, smell sulphur banks, walk through Thurston Lava Tube, and hike Devastation Trail …

Here’s a confession that’s likely to earn me a few rude comments (if not outright death threats): I don’t like Yosemite. Or at least I didn’t, until very recently. Hot, crowded, and dusty, it always held all the charm of a refugee camp for me.

I could see that it was magnificent, I just couldn’t transcend the tour buses and carbon monoxide.

In fact only about 5% of Yosemite’s 3.2 million annual visitors ever leave the valley floor.